# Parents Quit IT: Tailored Messaging and Decision Support to Help Parents Quit Smoking in Pediatric Settings

> **NIH NIH K08** · CHILDREN'S HOSP OF PHILADELPHIA · 2022 · $186,408

## Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract
Secondhand smoke exposure affects more than 40% of the US pediatric population and exacerbates and/or
increases the risk of disease morbidity and mortality. By helping parents quit smoking, pediatricians protect
children and families from the harms of tobacco. Pediatricians are uniquely positioned to intervene but
appropriate treatments are delivered to parent smokers less than 3% of the time. Major barriers to wider
adoption include lack of understanding of effective pediatrician-parent communication regarding tobacco
cessation treatment and mechanisms to systematize, consistently deliver, and scale effective interventions.
A multi-disciplinary research approach incorporating decision science and clinical informatics could maximize
intervention effectiveness while simplifying, standardizing, and systematizing parental treatment for tobacco
use in pediatric clinical practice. To lead this research and establish my long-term career goal as a clinician-
scientist dedicated to preventing cancer by protecting families and vulnerable populations from tobacco, my
training objectives involve developing skills in critical theoretical and methodological areas including: 1)
behavioral economics, 2) human factors engineering, and 3) clinical and pragmatic trial methodology. My
career development will be fostered through my multidisciplinary mentoring team, including Alexander Fiks,
MD, MSCE (primary mentor, expert in using health IT to improve clinical decision making), Robert Schnoll,
PhD (co-mentor, expert in tobacco treatment trials), and David Asch, MD, MBA (co-mentor, expert in
behavioral economics). My advisory committee will further guide my career development and will provide
expertise in data analysis in clinical trials, human factors engineering, qualitative methods, and dissemination
and health system integration.
Building upon my preliminary work, this training will be leveraged to create and evaluate a novel intervention, a
clinical decision support (CDS) tool embedded within the electronic health record (EHR), for tobacco treatment
in the pediatric setting, grounded in behavioral economics and developed using rigorous informatics design
methods, neither of which have been applied to this context. The research approach includes: developing
theory-based messages that engage parents in tobacco cessation treatment (Aim 1), identifying effective
methods for delivering these messages using CDS tools (Aim 2), and measuring the impact of these messages
on parent quit rates (Aim 3). The results from these aims, which logically build towards the development of a
testable, theory-driven intervention, will lead to future R01 grants that support the testing of CDS interventions
optimized for effectively and systematically addressing parent smoking in pediatric settings.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10460163
- **Project number:** 5K08CA226390-05
- **Recipient organization:** CHILDREN'S HOSP OF PHILADELPHIA
- **Principal Investigator:** Brian P. Jenssen
- **Activity code:** K08 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $186,408
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-09-01 → 2023-12-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10460163

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10460163, Parents Quit IT: Tailored Messaging and Decision Support to Help Parents Quit Smoking in Pediatric Settings (5K08CA226390-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10460163. Licensed CC0.

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